First impressions

Huawei may be one of the biggest names in electronics manufacturing, in fact you may be using one of the company's well-known USB modems right now. However, it has a long, uphill battle to carve out a name for itself alongside Samsung, Nokia and HTC. To make its mark, Huawei has so far launched a series of super-cheap smartphones, including the AU$200 Ideos, but it's going to need a killer flagship to really let people know it means business.

We got a chance to try this flagship for ourselves at a recent event hosted by Huawei. The Ideos X6 is a smart-looking smartphone, with a large, boxy square frame, similar to Samsung's Omnia 7. The X6's frame accommodates a 4.1-inch capacitive LCD touchscreen and a row of capacitive touch keys for menu navigation. It's also quite slim, at only 10mm in depth, and the glass on the screen is smooth and easy to swipe your fingers over.

The X6 runs Android 2.2 (though it'll be interesting to see if that is upgraded before its release in Q2, 2011) without any embellishments from Huawei. This is the stock Android experience in all its glory, and from our brief time with the device we'd say it's better for it.

The X6 is also pitched as a capable multimedia device, with HDMI-out, DivX video playback and the Snapdragon processor is powerful enough in to play HD video files. With an HDMI adapter you'll be able to stream HD files up to 720p directly to your flat panel TV.

Outlook

Huawei is promising that this handset will not only be in line with the best from its competitors, but that it will be significantly cheaper. It's hard to say exactly what that means so far out from its release, but if we found the X6 in stores for between AU$400-$600 we'd be very impressed indeed.